Hollywood Actors Archives

Valentina Cortese

Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..

TCM Overview:

European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973

Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).

In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.

Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.

In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.

These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.

So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.

“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”

In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.

On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.

Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.

Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.

By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”

In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).

Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.

Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).

In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.

Jackie died in 2015.
Ronald Bergan

John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).

One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.

Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.

She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.

Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.

• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019

• John Francis Lane died in 2018

Ann Harding. TCM Overview.

Peter Ibbetson, poster, Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, 1935. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Ann Harding was a beautiful elegant blonde actress whose career in film was at it’s peak in the 1930’s. Later in the 50’s and 60’s she resumed film making as a character actress. She was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1903. She made her film debut in 1929 opposite Fredric March in “Paris Bound”. She was nominated for an Academy Award for “Holiday” in in 1931. She starred Gary Cooper in “Peter Ibbetson”. She did not make any movies between 1937 and 1942 .

TCM overview:

Established Broadway lead who landed a contract in 1929 with Pathe (very soon thereafter part of RKO) and starred in a series of soap operas through the mid-1930s, most typically as suffering heroines who must make noble sacrifices for the men they love. With her ash-blonde hair usually swept back into a bun, the patrician Harding brought a gentle, serene strength to such worthy star vehicles as “When Ladies Meet” (1933) and “The Life of Vergie Winters” (1934) but fared less well in such awkward efforts as “Devotion” (1931) and “Enchanted April” (1935). Ideal for the philosophical sophistication of playwright Phillip Barry, Harding shone in fine adaptations of two of Barry’s best comedy-drama talkfests: “Holiday” (1930), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, and “The Animal Kingdom” (1932). Two of her best films came late in her reign as a star: the haunting, almost surreal love story “Peter Ibbetson” (1935, opposite Gary Cooper) and the taut suspense melodrama “Love from a Stranger” (1937, with Basil Rathbone).

Harding’s boxoffice power declined sharply after 1935 partly as a result of her typecasting in virtuous roles and she retired two years later after marrying symphony conductor Werner Janssen. In 1942, however, she returned to the screen in the enjoyable mystery “Eyes in the Night”, and subsequently kept intermittently busy in a series of maternal character roles through the mid 50s. Her best part during this time was as the wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes (played by Louis Calhern) in “The Magnificent Yankee” (1950), but the gracefully maturing Harding also played notable roles in “Those Endearing Young Charms” (1945) and “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1955).

Interesting interview with Harding’s biographer Scott O’Brien here.

Richard Jaeckel obituary in “The Independent” in 2011.

Richard Jaeckel was born in 1926 in Long Beach, New York. His first two films were celebrated war films, “Battleground” and “Sands of Imo Jima”. Among his other films are “Come Back Little Sheba”, “The Dirty Dozen” and “Flaming Star”. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his acting in “Sometimes A Great Notion” for his beautiful performance as a member of a logging family in Oregon. Richard Jaeckel died in 1997

His obituary in “The Independent”:Blond, blue-eyed and stocky, the baby-faced Richard Jaeckel was a prolific character actor who specialised in ebullient, pugnacious youths, notably in war films and westerns.

Seemingly ageless, when he played the devious outlaw who tries to out- gun John Wayne in Chisum in 1970 he seemed little older than as the over- confident youngster who attempted to out-draw Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter 20 years earlier. An actor popular with the public and within the profession, Jaeckel was rarely out of work in a 54-year career. Nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971), he more recently had a recurring role in the television series Baywatch.

Born in Long Beach, New York, in 1926, he was working in the 20th Century- Fox mailroom when, in story-book fashion, he was selected to play a featured role in the studio’s major war movie Guadalcanal Diary (1943). As an inexperienced teenage marine (nicknamed “Chicken”) who distinguishes himself in battle, Jaeckel made a strong impression in this popular adaptation of Richard Tregaskis’ book (“Richard Jaeckel scores as a downy-faced juvenile,” said Variety). He played another serviceman, this time a young pilot on an aircraft carrier, in Henry Hathaway’s fine account of events leading to the Battle of Midway, Wing and a Prayer (1944), before spending four years in the US Navy.

Returning to Hollywood in 1948, he settled into steady employment in tough roles, as a delinquent in City Across the River (1949), soldiers in Sands of Iwo Jima and Battleground (both 1949) and cowboys in Wyoming Mail and The Gunfighter (both 1950). In the latter, Henry King’s classic study of a notorious gunfighter’s futile attempt to discard his reputation and settle down, Jaeckel had one of his most memorable vignettes as the cocky youngster who sets off a tragic chain of events when, determined to prove himself faster with the gun than Johnny Ringo (Gregory Peck), he misguidedly provokes the gunfighter into a duel.

In Daniel Mann’s Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), he had a prime role as a college boy with sex on his mind who flirts agressively with the nubile Terry Moore and invokes the jealousy of her landlord (Burt Lancaster). At this time he seemed on the verge of stardom, but his stature and boyish appearance worked against him and he settled into a career of prominent but secondary roles in such action fare as Apache Ambush (1955), Cowboy (1955) and The Naked and the Dead (1958).

Two of the his finest films during this period were Robert Aldrich’s uncompromising picture of corruption and incompetence within the military, Attack! (1956), in which Jaeckel was a private under the command of a cowardly captain, and Delmer Daves’ taut western 3:10 to Yuma (1957), in which Jaeckel was an outlaw determined to rescue a captured gang-leader (Glenn Ford) before he can be transported by train to the big city and justice.

In 1967 Jaeckel played the no-nonsense sergeant who helps convert a motley bunch of military criminals into a viable fighting force in Aldrich’s violent and enormously successful The Dirty Dozen, the biggest-grossing film of the year. Jaeckel’s Sergeant Howren was one of the few characters to survive the film, and he recreated the role in the sequel made for television, The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985).

In the generally disappointing Sometimes a Great Notion (1971, released in the UK as Never Give an Inch), directed by Paul Newman and based on Ken Kesey’s novel about a family of loggers in Oregon, Jaeckel featured in one of the screen’s most memorable and harrowing death scenes. Pinned underwater by a fallen tree, he slowly drowns as Newman desperately tries to free him. Despite the starry cast of Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick, it was Jaeckel whose performance was unanimously lauded as the best thing in the film and he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.

Further film roles included Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1978), Starman (1985) and Delta Force 2 (1990), but Jaeckel’s later work was primarily in television. He starred in the series Frontier Circus (1961) with John Derek and Chill Wills, and as guest star on countless shows, including Bonanza, Wagon Train, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Mission Impossible. In the mid-Eighties he had a role as Lt Quirk in the series Spenser: For Hire, and in 1991 and 1992, at last beginning to look his age, he played in Baywatch as Lt Ben Edwards, the grizzled veteran who co-ordinates rescue activity.

Richard Jaeckel, actor: born Long Beach, New York 10 October 1926; married (two sons); died Woodland Hills, California 14 June 1997.

His “Independent” obituary can also be accessed here.

Nobu McCarthy.

Nobu MCarthy was born Nobu Atsumi in Canada in 1934 of Japanese parents. She was raised in Japan and in 1955 married U.S. serviceman David McCarthy and moved with him to the U.S.A. She made her film debut in 1958 in “The Geisha Boy” with Jerry Lewis. She had the female lead in “Walk Like a Dragon” and “Five Gates to Hell”. She appeared in many of the major television series of the 60’s and 70’s. She became a member of the East West Players a Los Angeles based theatre group. Nobu McCarthy died in Brazil in 2002 while on location for a film.

Her obituary in “Backs

Nobu McCarthy, a Hollywood starlet who later became artistic director of the pioneering theater company East West Players, has died. She was 67. McCarthy died Saturday after being stricken on the set of a movie that she was working on in Londrina, Brazil. She had just returned to work after recovering from pneumonia and was stricken with what doctors diagnosed as an aneurysm in her aorta, said Tamlyn Tomita, an actress also in the cast.The movie “Gaijin II,” about several generations of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, suspended production following McCarthy’s death.

McCarthy was born as Nobu Atsumi in Ottawa, Canada, where her father was a private secretary to the Japanese ambassador. She was brought to Japan as a baby and later trained in ballet and sang with choral groups on stage and radio. She became a successful model and was named Miss Tokyo in the competition leading up to the Miss Universe pageant. She married U.S. Army Sgt. David McCarthy in 1955 despite the objections of her parents. An agent spotted her in Little Tokyo and she was sent to an audition at Paramount Pictures that landed her a role in the Jerry Lewis comedy “The Geisha Boy” in 1958. During her busiest period in Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s, McCarthy appeared in “The Hunters,” “Wake Me When It’s Over” and “Walk Like a Dragon.”

Original Cinema Belgian Poster – Movie Film Posters

McCarthy withdrew from acting in the late 1960s, but after a divorce in 1970 she revived her career via East West Players by joining the company in 1971 and playing a number of roles on its small stage. East West Players, the country’s first Asian American theater company, was founded in 1965 by Mako and others. “We all liked her,” said Mako, the group’s founding artistic director. “She became a very steady actress, although she had arthritis that sometimes made her move in a way that looked older than she was.”

East West Players went through a turbulent period in 1989 and Mako resigned under pressure from the board. McCarthy was selected as his replacement and served as artistic director until 1993. “She brought her calming influence to the group, broadened the outreach, and brought a sense of balance and stability,” said George Takei, best known for his role as Sulu in “Star Trek.” Later credits for McCarthy included the landmark TV movie “Farewell to Manzanar” in 1976 and the films “Karate Kid II” in 1986 and “Pacific Heights” in 1990. McCarthy and her second husband, the late William Cuthbert, received a lifetime achievement award from East West in 1996. McCarthy is survived by two children from her first marriage and three brothers.

Peter Finch said once: ‘I’ve been lucky. My agent might have hoped that I’d be a bigger name – as they call it – in America but I’m very happy. I like what I do and I choose what I do’. He did not always choose wisely. He was marked for the heights of stardom when he made his forst film in Britain but for a while the real peaks eluded him – too many bad films and kiss of death, a long-term Rank contract.

In the right material he always looked good. He had a good actor’s voice and stance, a touch of arrogance, a touch of humour, some warmth, leading man’s looks and the same sort of gritty dependability that characterized the malestars of Hollywood’s golden age” – David Shipman’s “The Great Movie Stars- The International years”. (1972)

He won for his performance in “Network” in 1976. Peter Finch was born in London in 1916. He went to live in Australia when he was ten years of age. He made his first film in Australia in 1938, The film was entitled “Dad and Dave Come to Town”.

When Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh were touring that country with the Old Vic in 1948 they met Peter Finch and he was offered a role by Oliver in the play “Daphne Laureola” in London which he accepted.He made the film “The Miniver Story” in England and then went to Hollywood to make “Elephant Walk” with Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews. Over the next few years he made many fine films including “A Town Like Alice”, “The Nun’s Story”, “The Girl With Green Eyes”, “No Love for Johnny” and “Far From the Madding Crowd”. He was enjoying the huge revival of his career when he died from a heart attack in 1977 at the age of sixty. Peter Finch was the first actor to win a Academy Award for Best Actor after his death

TCM Overview:

The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, poster, US poster art, Peter Finch, 1960. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

A former vaudeville performer and popular radio actor in Australia, Peter Finch transitioned to film in his native England, where he rose from supporting actor to leading man in a number of emotionally charged dramas. While he delivered more than a few notable performances in his four-decade career, Finch was forever identified as the raving mad prophet Howard Beale in “Network” (1976), whose line “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” remained one of the most identifiable in all of cinema history. After supporting roles in several British-made films, he made the Hollywood transition with “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Elephant” (1954).

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Finch went back and forth between films made in Hollywood and England, earning award nominations along the way for his performances in “The Nun’s Story” (1959), “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Some time passed before Finch delivered another noteworthy performance, this time earning acclaim for his sympathetic and non-clichéd turn as a gay man in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971).

A few years later, he captured attention as the raving maniac Beale in “Network,” only to die from a heart attack two months before winning his one and only Academy Award, making him the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar.

Born on Sept. 28, 1916 in London, England, Finch was raised by his father, George, a research chemist from Australia who moved to England prior to World War I, and his mother, Alicia. His parents divorced when he was just two years old, leading to his father being given custody.

Decades later, Finch discovered that George was not his biological father and that his mother had carried on with an army officer named Wentworth Edward Dallas Campbell, leading to his parents’ divorce. After living for a time with his paternal grandmother in France, the 10-year-old was sent to live with his great uncle in Sydney, Australia.

After graduating from North Sydney Intermediate High School, Finch worked as a waiter, an apprentice on a sheep farm, and a copy boy for the Sydney Sun, but soon felt the pull of stage acting. He began appearing in sideshows and vaudeville, even serving as a stooge for American comedian Bert le Blanc before touring Australia with George Sorlie’s traveling company.

It was with Sorlie’s troupe that gained Finch notice with a producer from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who served as his mentor and cast him in a children’s radio series. At the time, he also made his feature debut in “Dad and Dave Come to Town” (1938), which led to a more substantial part in the crime drama “Mr. Chedworth Steps Out” (1939). But with the world on the brink of war, Finch’s acting career was put on hold in order for him to enlist in the Australian army in 1941.

He served for a time in the Middle East and participated in the Bombing of Darwin as an anti-aircraft gunner, though he did continue to perform by appearing in the wartime propaganda film “The Rats of Tobruk” (1944), and directing plays for tours of army bases and hospitals. Following his discharge with the rank of sergeant in 1945, Finch established himself as one of Australia’s premiere radio actors and went on to co-found the Mercury Theatre Company with fellow actors Allan Ashbolt, Sydney John Kay, Colin Scrimgeour and John Wiltshire.

Named after Orson Welles’ own company, the Mercury put on a number of notable plays, including “The Imaginary Invalid” (1948), which starred Finch and attracted the attention of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who later invited the actor to London. He returned to films with supporting roles in British productions like “Train of Events” (1949), “Eureka Stockade” (1949) and “The Wooden Horse” (1950), before making the turn toward Hollywood films.

He played the Sheriff of Nottingham in “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” (1952) and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor – who took over for an ailing Vivian Leigh – in the rather disappointing melodrama “Elephant Walk” (1954). His career took off as he approached middle age in the mid-1950s with films including the charming romantic comedy “Simon and Laura” (1955), “The Dark Avenger” (1955) co-starring Errol Flynn, and the somber war drama “A Town Like Alice” (1956). In “Robbery Under Arms” (1957), he played famed cattle thief Captain Starlight, while he earned critical acclaim and a BAFTA nomination for his turn as a crusty surgeon working with an attractive nun (Audrey Hepburn) in the Belgian Congo in “The Nun’s Story” (1959).

Finch was somewhat less busy during the 1960s, but early in the decade he delivered to acclaimed, award-winning performances, playing the title roles in the biopic “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” (1960) and the Parliament-set drama “No Love for Johnnie” (1961). Both roles earned him BAFTA Awards for Best Actor. He next starred opposite Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury in the drama about marriage and infidelity, “In the Cool of the Day” (1963), before playing the third husband of a restless Anne Bancroft in the domestic drama “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964).

After starring in another relationship drama, “Girl With Green Eyes” (1964), Finch had a supporting role as a captain in the action yarn “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), starring James Stewart, and settled into a series of smaller films like “Judith” (1966), “Far from the Maddening Crowd” (1966), “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968) and “The Red Tent” (1969). He went on to deliver a powerful performance as a homosexual doctor engaged in a love triangle with Murray Head and Glenda Jackson in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), a revolutionary drama for its frank and rather sympathetic perspective on homosexuality. His performance as the well-adjusted doctor seeking escape from his repressed upbringing earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

After his Oscar-worthy performance in “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Finch starred in a string of mediocre films like “Shattered” (1972), a psychological drama about the disintegration of a man’s life due to alcohol and a bad marriage, and “Lost Horizon” (1973), a disastrous remake of Frank Capra’s 1937 original of the same name. After playing real-life Cardinal Azzolino in “The Abdication” (1974), Finch played the one character that he would forever be indentified with, TV news anchor Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves whose mental breakdown on live television leads to a ratings bonanza for a struggling upstart station in Sydney Lumet’s searing satire, “Network” (1976). Also starring William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, the film was a major critical and commercial hit, and received 10 Academy Award nominations. But just two months before the Oscar ceremony, on Jan. 15, 1977, Finch suffered a fatal heart in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was waiting to meet Lumet for breakfast. He was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead hours later. Finch was 60 years old. At the ceremony, he won the Oscar for Best Actor, which was accepted by “Network” writer Paddy Chayefsky and Finch’s third wife, Eletha Barrett. Soon after, he was posthumously nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance as Yitzhak Rabin in the television movie, “Raid on Entebbe” (NBC, 1977), which aired days before he died and was the last time Finch was seen on screen.

By Shawn DwyerThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Blog on Peter Finch in “Pop Matters” can be accessed here.

Richard Egan

Richard Egan was born in 1929 in San Francisco. Among his first film credits was as Joan Crawford’s husband in “The Damned Don’t Cry” in 1950. He starred opposite Elvis Presley in “Love Me Tender” where he won Debra Paget away from Presley. I thought that this was a bit unbelievable when Elvis was such a major star.

Richard Egan played the dad of Sandra Dee, uhappily married to Constance Ford in “A Summer Place” in 1959. The film is remembered now for it’s hit theme tune and for the breakthrough role of Troy Donahue. He was in “Pollyanna” but this was the breakthrough role of Hayley Mills. He appeared in the television series “Empire” which was the breakthrough role for Ryan O’Neal. He died at the age of 63 in 1987.

TCM overview:

Richard Egan (July 29, 1921 – July 20, 1987) was an American actor. In some films he is credited as Richard Eagan. Born in San Francisco, California, Egan served in the United States Army as a judo instructor during World War II. A graduate of the University of San Francisco (B.A.) and Stanford University (M.A.).

In 1956, he starred in Presley’s first film, Love Me Tender, and in 1959 was the male lead opposite Dorothy McGuire in A Summer Place.

In 1960, Egan appeared in such films as Pollyanna, Esther and the King. Other noteworthy films include Undercover Girl, Split Second, A View from Pompey’s Head,”Voice In The Mirror”, about the man who started AA, and The 300 Spartans.

During the decade of the 60s, Richard Egan worked extensively in television, starring in the western drama series, Empire from 1962 to 1964. After his series ended, he made guest appearances on other television shows as well as acting in several motion pictures for the big screen plus in films made specifically for television.

In 1982 he joined the cast for the new daytime television political drama Capitol.

Richard Egan died in Los Angeles, California, on July 20th, 1987, 9 days before his 66th birthday, and was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in suburban Culver City, California.

Richard Egan was respected within the acting community for having helped a number of young actors get their first break in the film industry.

To view article on Richard Egan, please click here.

Patricia Medina obituary in “The Guardian” in 2012.

Although the actor Patricia Medina, who has died aged 92, had a cut-glass English accent, her voluptuous Latin looks often prevented her from playing English characters. As her name suggests, she was half-Spanish, born in Liverpool, the daughter of a Spanish father – a lawyer and former opera singer – and an English mother.

Medina, who appeared in more than 50 feature films, many of them costume dramas, was seldom called upon to display much acting ability, though she was an unusually spirited damsel in distress. However, she used the one chance she had to work with a director of magnitude, Orson Welles, in Mr Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report, 1955), to show what she was capable of. As Mily, in this breathless, globetrotting film, she is an earthy nightclub dancer who attempts to seduce the amnesiac billionaire Welles. It was through Welles that Medina met her second husband, Joseph Cotten, to whom she was married for 34 years until his death in 1994.

In her late teens, Medina was tested at Elstree studios. “I was awful,” she recalled. “The fact is I couldn’t act. I can’t believe they liked me. But one producer said it was because I was beautiful.” She made 10 films in Britain from 1937 to 1945, including The First of the Few (1942), They Met in the Dark (1943), with James Mason, and a haunted house comedy, Don’t Take It to Heart (1944), opposite her first husband, Richard Greene. It was around this period that she was given the title “the most beautiful face in the whole of England”.

In 1945 Medina moved to Los Angeles with Greene, who had already made a career there. Her first Hollywood picture was the psychological melodrama The Secret Heart (1946), though she was barely noticed down the cast list headed by Claudette Colbert, Walter Pidgeon and June Allyson. She went on to play sultry loose women in two period pieces: The Foxes of Harrow (1947) and The Fighting O’Flynn (1949), the latter with her husband.Advertisement

After playing stooge to a talking mule in Francis (1950) and to Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), Medina embarked on her swashbuckler’s lady period, starting with four films co-starring Louis Hayward: Fortunes of Captain Blood (1950), its sequel, Captain Pirate (1952), The Lady and the Bandit (1951) and Lady in the Iron Mask (1952).

There were also the Arabian Nights fantasies such as The Magic Carpet (1951), Aladdin and His Lamp (1952), and Siren of Bagdad (1953), with Medina’s beautiful dark eyes flashing behind veils. She was the feminine interest in Botany Bay (1953), starring Alan Ladd and James Mason, and Sangaree (1953), conveniently dying as Arlene Dahl’s rival for Fernando Lamas, and as the beautiful obsession of Karl Malden’s biologist/misogynist in Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954). On television, she appeared in episodes of Zorro and in horse operas such as Rawhide and Have Gun Will Travel, usually as a Mexican.

Botany Bay, lobbycard, from left, James Mason, Patricia Medina, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Despite continuing to appear in hokum such as Drums of Tahiti (1954), Pirates of Tripoli (1955), Duel on the Mississippi (1955) and The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956), Medina, by now divorced from Greene, was having “one hell of a time”, as she put it.

In 1960 she married Cotten. They were an odd couple – she, a vivacious extrovert; he, a quiet, gentlemanly Virginian. They were inseparable, although they rarely appeared together on screen. But in 1962 Medina made her Broadway debut opposite Cotten in Calculated Risk, a whodunit that ran for six months.

One of her few films over the last decades was Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (1968), in which she played a dominatrix.

When Cotten’s health deteriorated, Medina devoted herself to him, working only spasmodically. In 1998 she published her memoirs, Laid Back in Hollywood.

• Patricia Medina, actor, born 19 July 1919; died 28 April 2012

“The Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan can be accessed online here.

Carolyn Jones

Carolyn Jones is chiefly known for her role as Mortica in the cult television series “The Adams Family”. However she is much much more than that. She gave several highly effective performances in the 1950’s and 1960’s and it is a pity that Mortica has obscured her other roles. She was born in Amarillo, Taxas in 1930. Jones spent several years in tiny parts in films and on television. In 1957 she was featured in “Batchelor Party” as a beatnik who was lonely and looking for security. She was heartbreaking in the role and was nominated for an Academy Award. Over the next five years she made several good movies, “Hole in the Head”, “King Creole” “Last Train from Gun Hill” and “Ice Palace”. Then came “The Adams Family”. When the series finished, she seemed to concentrate on television At the time of her death in 1983 she was starring in the long-running soap “Capitol”.

In addition to her movie work, Miss Jones appeared in about 30 different television programs, including six episodes in the ”Dragnet” series. She also had roles in ”Playhouse 90” productions and the ”Colgate Comedy Hour.” But it was her performances in the early 1960’s television series, ”The Addams Family,” that brought her greater popularity than any of her movie portrayals.

She is survived by her husband and a sister, Betty, of Massachusetts.

Article on Carolyn Jones on the “Cult Sirens” website here.
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THE TURNING POINT, US poster art, Edmond O’Brien, Alexis Smith, William Holden, Carolyn Jones, 1952.

New York Times obituary in 1983:

The movie and television actress Carolyn Jones, who was best known for her role as the ghoulish Morticia in the television series ”The Addams Family,” died of cancer today at her home here. She was 50 years old.

Among the films in which Miss Jones appeared were, ”Marjorie Morningstar,” ”The Road to Bali,” ”Baby Face Nelson” ”The Saracen Blade,” ”The Man Who Knew Too Much,” ”The Seven Year Itch,” ”House of Wax,” ”The Tender Trap,” ”Last Train From Gun Hill” and ”Ice Palace.”

Miss Jones was born in Amarillo, Tex., and showed an early interest in acting. When she was 15 years old, she enrolled in classes at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, even though she was three years under the acceptable age.

Her first motion-picture role came as a result of a Playhouse production when she was seen by a talent scout and signed to appear with William Holden in ”The Turning Point” in 1952.

Miss Jones’s first marriage, to the producer Aaron Spelling, ended in 1964. She later married Herbert Green, a conductor-arranger, and lived in semiretirement for two years in Palm Springs – which she called ”God’s waiting room.” After her second marriage ended in divorce, Miss Jones married an actor, Peter Bailey-Britton, in 1981.

She is survived by her husband and a sister, Betty, of Massachusetts

Wolf Call, US lobbycard, Movita, (third left), John Carroll, (right), 1939. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Movita obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2017.

Movita who has died in Los Angeles aged 98, was briefly the second wife of Marlon Brando, although his paramour for much longer; she also herself had a minor career in Hollywood, most notably featuring in the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, which Brando remade nearly three decades later.

The details of her relationship with Brando were complex and shrouded in mystery. Much of this was deliberate on his part. Not only did he dislike press intrusion into his personal life, he also enjoyed the licence that his status gave him to conduct it with little regard for others .

He and Movita Castaneda, who was of Mexican descent, first met in about 1951 while sharing a taxi when he was researching the life of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Castaneda was then in her mid-thirties, eight years older than Brando, and divorced from Jack Doyle, the former boxer.

Brando, the rising star, found her amusing and sympathetic. He had a penchant for fiery Latin women, and made use of Castaneda in part to lend an authentic inflection to his screen portrayal of Zapata in 1952. They also became lovers, albeit from the start she knew that she was merely one of an exhaustive – indeed, exhausting – rota of lovers of both sexes; among them was Marilyn Monroe.

Movita Castaneda had already enjoyed tempestuous affairs with Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, but with Brando she was content to remain in the shadows. This suited Brando, who kept her quartered nearby as he made Julius Caesar (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954). At times he introduced her as his girlfriend, but there were several break-ups even before he married the British actress Anna Kashfi in 1957.

Brando and Anna Kashfi divorced within two years, and began a long and bitter dispute for custody of their son, Christian. In court, it then emerged that Brando had secretly married Movita Castaneda in Mexico in 1960, perhaps because she was then pregnant . Their son, christened Sergio but always known as Miko, later became one of Michael Jackson’s principal confidants.

Despite being legally her husband, Brando still declined to live with Castaneda, and in the early Sixties publicly continued with a bachelor existence. Much of that time he spent in Tahiti, shooting Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Soon after its release, he announced that he was to marry his 19-year-old co-star, Tarita Teri’ipaia.

Tired of his philandering, Movita Castaneda decamped to Mexico. In 1966 she would give birth to their daughter, Rebecca, even though their marriage had by then been dissolved. (Brando is thought to have sired at least 15 children, not all of them acknowledged; one theory has it that he may be the grandfather of the singer Courtney Love).

Although sources give several dates of birth for her, Movita Castaneda was born (according to her family) on April 12 1916, on a moving train which had just crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona. She was christened Maria Luisa and was one of 10 children; her sister Petra is still alive aged 102.

She was educated at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, and her ability to play guitar led to her being spotted by film scouts. She made her screen debut in 1933, singing the Oscar-nominated Carioca in Flying Down to Rio. The tune was noteworthy for providing the music for the first time that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen dancing together on screen.

Movita’s looks led to her being cast in exotic roles in several other films of the period, including Mutiny on the Bounty, in which she played Franchot Tone’s island love interest – although it was his co-star Gable who caught her eye. For publicity purposes, MGM executives renamed her “Movita”, which she thereafter retained.

Her other films in this period include Captain Calamity (1936), with George Houston and Marian Nixon; El Capitan Tormenta (1936), with Lupita Tovar; Paradise Isle (1937), which had the tag-line “His strong arms drew this red-lipped-beauty to him!”; and The Hurricane (1937), directed by John Ford.

In 1939 she married Jack Doyle . The 6ft 5in Irishman, known as “The Gorgeous Gael”, was noted for his fondness for women and drink. In 1933 he lost the fight for the British heavyweight title after being disqualified for punching low, allegedly while hung-over and suffering from venereal disease. He had more success against Clark Gable, whom he is said to have knocked out following a row over Carole Lombard.

Doyle had by then made a second career as a singer, but his eye for the ladies had led the Dodge automobile family to send a gunman after him when he proposed to marry its heiress, Delphine. His first wife, the actress Judith Allen, had previously got shot of him by sending him a telegram marked merely “Finished”.

After their wedding in Dublin, he and Movita Castaneda became a well-known attraction in British music halls. They recorded a hit song, South of the Border, and opened a nightclub in London, the Swizzle Stick. Movita Castaneda saw out the Blitz there, and in 1941 appeared in the British thriller Tower of Terror.

Her real fear, however, was reserved for Doyle when he was in drink. They divorced in 1944 after he had beaten her up, causing her to miscarry, when she caught him dallying with a woman in a taxi outside their home. (Doyle died penniless in 1978).

After returning to Hollywood, she began to rebuild her career with bit parts in films, such as playing Henry Fonda’s cook in Fort Apache (1948).

She and Brando remained on amicable terms until his death in 2004, although he kept her short of money, forcing her to work for a time as a delivery driver for a garage. Later she had a small role for some years in the Dallas spin-off, Knots Landing.

Her children survive her.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Valentina Cortese

Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

Ann Harding

Ann Harding. TCM Overview.

Richard Jaeckel

Richard Jaeckel obituary in “The Independent” in 2011.

Nobu McCarthy

Nobu McCarthy.

Peter Finch

Richard Egan

Richard Egan

Patricia Medina

Patricia Medina obituary in “The Guardian” in 2012.

Carolyn Jones

Carolyn Jones

New York Times obituary in 1983:

Movita

Movita obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2017.

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